Liveright is a 5k run/walk held to raise awareness of Hepatitis B and liver cancer.

Gaieties is looking for anyone with or without acting, singing or dancing experience.

Biversity talks are at nine p.m. on Mondays at the Women’s Center.

Face AIDS presents Dr. Paul Farmer on Wednesday.

I know all of this not because I am a gay Asian singer-actress pre-med, but because I am an active bathroom reader.

I read absolutely everything that appears on the inside of my bathroom stall — I am hungry for input while on the john. I have re-read flyers so many times I can repeat them verbatim, and even when the date of the event on the ad comes and goes, I leave the flyer up so that I can continue to review its contents. I scour each posting, drinking in every scrap of information and analyzing each picture.

Really, with all of my flyer reading, I’d like to think that I have become a bit of a flyer expert. I have seen so many come and go that I know exactly what makes a fun, eye-catching, easy-to-read ad. In fact, I think that I have started to get a little flyer-cocky — I have started to judge, with increasing harshness, which flyers pale in comparison to their more well-crafted counterparts. I scoff at the novice flyer-making mistakes. Are you really going to bring that no-picture half-page flyer into my stall, Women’s Center? Yeah well, we’ll see who shows up to your meeting with that kind of amateur advertising rubbish.

As I was reading the properly photo-rich Gaieties auditions flyer for the billionth time, I tried to understand why I so thoroughly fine-tooth-combed every scrap of paper that gets taped to the back of my bathroom door. I am not sure whether bathroom reading is simply something to do while you are doing your business, or whether I subconsciously use flyer-reading as a point of mental departure, a subtle way to procrastinate without feeling like I am slacking, since, after all, I am just going to the bathroom. Either way, if someone left their dissertation in the bathroom with a polite note asking for comments, I would leave more detailed notes than their advisor.

Let’s do the math. If, on average, it takes one minute to do your business (for the ladies, that is. Men, I would guess that it most likely takes you less time), and the properly hydrated person uses the porcelain god four times a day, then that’s four minutes a day, for 365 days, which comes out to 24 hours and 20 minutes a year of solid bathroom reading. Just imagine what you could do with a full day’s time. You could start — and finish — “War and Peace.” You could watch a full season of 24. You could drive to somewhere in the Midwest. And that is notwithstanding those with less than average quantities of fiber in their diet.

Bathroom reading is just one result of the ever-hungry mind questing for visual input — this thirst for information extends into many other realms. I can’t tell you how many times I have inexplicably led Jimmy Cheerio through a maze on the back of a cereal box. Or browsed through the long list of donors to the Arts Society in my playbill for funny-sounding names. I read and answer all of the on-screen 70’s movie trivia that plays before the trailers at movie theaters as if it were the SATs. And I’ve somehow been compelled to read through the emergency procedures brochure on the airplane when some previous passenger snagged my copy of SkyMall.

As humans, we are simply cursed with an analytical brain. When I frustratingly look again and again at a stupid bathroom stall flyer, sometimes I can’t help but think how I cannot not be thinking. No matter how much I want to let my mind be blank — to take a mental nap — it seems I am always on a semi-crazed mission to locate material within my visual field, even in the throes of a bowel movement. I suppose one could say that bathroom reading is what separates us from the apes, really.

Perhaps I should embrace the fact that my brain is always begging for input, and start bringing my textbooks into the water closet with me. After all, it would save me hours of time. I wonder if the University would respond to a fix-it request asking for shelves over the toilet...

The second-fastest way to get Katie to read something is to e-mail her at kttaylor@stanford.edu